Okay, I just threw Satan in there for sentimental reasons: he never gets billing in a movie even when he makes a cameo. And I just miss Redd Foxx.

To its credit, Washington D.C., the capital of our republic continues to exhibit a willingness uncomplicated by competence or sanity to live down to the second-rate standards for which I have regularly made a great deal of jocular hay here, so first, thank you for your service. Ridiculing the ideological hothouse flowers of the American right isn’t ridicule undertaken simply because they are just so darn ridiculous; but because their principal political vehicle the Republican Party has so effectively stymied, derailed, and set back progress and modernization in these United States.

Now they can add another feather to their funny hat, the crumpling of the United States Postal Service. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe proposed the end of Saturday letter delivery, effectively saying, “Uncle” to the anti-government Republicans who have placed such onerous restrictions on the Postal Service as to all but guarantee it would eventually tank. Donahue hasn’t put up much of a fight, apparently aspiring to be the Marshal Petain of the Vichy Post Office. This means nationwide, daily except for Sundays mail delivery becomes a luxury of modernity America no longer can afford, now apparently out of reach for our woebegone nation, joining transportation, health, infrastructure, broadband, and education among the areas in which America continues to slip further behind in comparison with other nations every year, a trend I cataloged somewhat elaborately in America the Basket Case.

This, like other instances noted previously, particularly in: The Republican Goal: Kill Liberal Programs Because They Work, is one of those classic Norquistian shrink the baby (until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub, government being the baby) campaigns hoping to besmirch the name of government by running it poorly when holding the reigns, and underfunding its operations and programs, while viciously propagandizing against them with feverish ideological rhetorical zeal at all times (You’ve probably heard how Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, etc. are the devil’s work). In this case, congressional Republicans, while in the majority in 2006, passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act requiring the Postal Service to prepay its pension fund seventy-five years in advance, unheard of in the public or private sector, forcing it into a vicious cycle of borrowing and default (sound familiar), worsening service and giving the putative black eye to government Republicans had in mind. Authorizing the Postal Service with legislation embedded with such a poison pill was akin to giving it smallpox-infected blankets (hey, it worked once before, with those Native Americans who refused to self-deport).

Any whimsical speculation the Republican Party could not possibly get any weirder and screwier was crushed this week when its organized base of glue-sniffing primates in the Tea Party began red-baiting Karl Rove. Republican politics has officially become an insidious plot to replace hallucinogenics. Karl Rove is now Karl Marx for having the temerity to apply his resources to backing candidates in Republican primaries with a chance to actually defeat a Democrat in a general election, unlike the slate of eccentric cheeseballs on their ballots of late. At the same time, Karl the Genius and Republican Savior, whose American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS superpacs squandered several hundred million dollars of big donor money in the 2012 elections with a one-percent success rate, is spending money now on ads attacking Ashley Judd, who maybe, kinda has expressed interest in running as a Democrat against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in: November, 2014. If she actually runs, old Karl might end up in worst financial shape than the Postal Service.

If you’re a sane American trying to survive in this country but retain a sense of humor, this past week was the best of times and the worst of times.